Characters in Hamlet

Characters in Hamlet

1. Hamlet

   • The prince of Denmark, son of Gertrude, nephew of Claudius, and heir to the throne. Hamlet is a deep thinker, focusing on impossible to answer questions about religion, death, truth, reality, and the motivations of others. He even obsessively contemplates the fact that he obsessively contemplates. He loves Ophelia and his mother, but his mother's marriage to Claudius makes him mistrust and even hate all women. He detests all forms of deception, yet plots and pretends to be insane. At times he even seems to be insane. Despite his obsessive thinking, he can act impulsively, as when he kills Polonius. Hamlet is an enigma, a man so complex even he doesn't completely know himself. In other words, he seems like a real person—which has made Hamlet the most well known character in English literature.
   • "To be, or not to be, —that is the question:— Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?" Act 3.1 "Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince;And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." Act 5.2
   • Critical views
     •  “By natural temperament he is more a thinker than a doer.” Hartley Coleridge "It is not from any want of attachment to his father or of abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice.”  William  Hazlitt “A  lovely, pure, noble and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast  away.” J.W Goethe  “[Melancholy] accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction.” A.C Bradley   Whereas he murder of his father evokes in him indignation, and a plain recognition of his obvious duty to avenge it, his mother's guilty conduct awakes in him the intensest horror.- Ernest Jones     

2. Claudius

   • Hamlet's uncle, and Gertrude's second husband. Power-hungry and lustful, Claudius murders his brother in order to take the throne of Denmark and marry his wife. Claudius is a great talker and schemer. He easily charms the royal court into accepting his hasty marriage to his brother's widow, and comes up with plot after plot to protect his ill-gained power. He is the consummate politician, yet his hold on power is always slightly tenuous. At various times he does show guilt for killing his brother, and his love of Gertrude seems genuine.
   • "O, villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!" Act 1.5 "We pray you throw to earth/This unprevailing woe, and think of us." Act 1.2 "The serpent that did sting thy father's life/Now wears his crown." Act 1.5
   • Critical views
     • Claudius is a prisoner of circumstance, burdened with a guilty responsibility, unable to rid himself of his enemy by forthright action. - David Bevington "Claudius, as he appears in the play, is not a criminal. He is -- strange as it may seem -- a good and gentle king, enmeshed by the chain of causality linking him with his crime.  Wilson Knight   "Claudius is an example of a spurious kind of authority, who has the persuasiveness and physical courage of a ruler, but who is morally empty." Martin Scofield

3. Gertrude

   • Hamlet's mother. After Hamlet's father dies, Gertrude quickly marries Hamlet's uncle, Claudius. Though she is a good woman and loving mother, she is weak-willed and unable to control her personal passions. Whether because of lust, love, or a desire to maintain her status as queen, she marries Claudius, though this is clearly a breach of proper morals. Though some critics have argued that Gertrude might have been involved in Claudius's plot to kill Old Hamlet, evidence in the text suggests that she is unaware of and uninvolved in the plot.
   • "O wicked wit, and gifts that have the power So to seduce!--won to his shameful lust The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen." Act 1.5 "O speak to me no more;these words like daggars enter my ears;No more, sweet Hamlet!" Act 3. 4
   • Critical Views
     •  "It is plain," he writes, that the Queen "does little except echo his [Claudius'] wishes; sometimes—as in the welcome to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—she repeats his very words"  Granville-Barker "The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature and was very dull and very shallow. She loved to be happy"  A.C Bradley

4. Polonious

   • The Lord Chamberlain of Denmark, and the father of Laertes and Ophelia, whom he loves deeply and wishes to protect, even to the point of spying on them. Polonius is pompous and long-winded, and has a propensity to scheme, but without Hamlet's or Claudius's skill. He is very aware of his position and role, and is always careful to try to be on the good side of power.
   • "This above all — to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man." Act 1.3
   • Critical view
     • "Polonius seems to love his children; he seems to have the welfare of the kingdom in mind. His means of action, however, are totally corrupt." Rebecca Smith   

5. Ophelia

   • Polonius's daughter, Laertes's sister, and Hamlet's love. As a woman, Ophelia must obey the men around her and is forced by her father first to stop speaking to Hamlet and then to help spy on him. Ophelia's loyalty to her father and resulting estrangement from Hamlet ultimately causes her to lose her mind. Though Laertes and Fortinbras are the characters usually seen as Hamlet's "doubles," Ophelia functions as a kind of female double of Hamlet—mirroring Hamlet's half-madness with her own full-blown insanity, and takes his obsession with suicide a step further and actually commits it.
   • "Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me." Act 3.1  "Your sister's drowned, Laertes." Act 4.7
   • Critical Views
     • Poor Ophelia!" wrote Anna Jameson. "Oh, far too soft, too good, too fair to be cast among the briers of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life!" “He plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton cruelty.” Samuel Jackson        "We can imagine Hamlet's story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet." GIOVANNI PAPINI "She escapes only into the ironic liberation of madness." ELAINE SHOWALTER

6. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

   • Friends of Hamlet's from Wittenberg who help Claudius and Gertrude try and figure out the source of Hamlet's melancholy. Hamlet sees that the two are, essentially, spying on him, and turns on them. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern aren't the smartest fellows, but they do seem to mean well, and the announcement of their deaths at the end of the play helps to drive home the absurd and bloody lengths to which vengeance can extend once it is unleashed.
   • "he hath much talk'd of you And sure I am, two men there is not living To who he more adheres." Act 2.2 "I entreat you both//That, being of so young days brought up with him//And since so neighbored to his youth and 'havior,That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court//Some little time so by your companies//To draw him on to pleasures and to gather,So much as from occasion you may glean,Whether aught, to us unknown, afflicts him thus" Act 2.2 ‘Why man, they did make love to this employment.They are not near my conscience, their defeat//Does by their own insinuation grow.'  Act 5.2
   • Critical View
     •  "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sacrifice the bond of human friendship to a social propriety" Marilyn French "They are society itself, and Shakespeare showed no little wisdom and discernment in bringing in a pair of them.' -- Goethe.